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The Amazing Authorities Podcast
Why Most ERP & CRM Projects Fail — And How to Avoid a Business Disaster
00:24:30
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Amazing Authorities podcast where game changers, visionaries and category leaders share how they built their brands, platforms and global influence. Your host is Mitch Carson, international speaker, media strategist and creator of the Instant Authority system. If you're ready to learn from those who've done it and want to become the go to expert in your space, you're in the right place.
- [00:32]
B
Dustin Domaresse, I hope I pronounced that correctly, is our guest today who is going to inform us not only is he a best selling author throughout the United States and I potentially in other parts of the world, once they catch wind of who he is, he makes the whole C suite very clear about what type of technology choices are pertinent to their situation. That was a mouthful, but I would rather welcome Dustin to the show and let him break that down a little bit better than than I did just now. But Dustin, happy to have you here.
- [01:17]
C
Hey Mitch, so glad to be with you today. I'm really excited about getting a chance to chat about this topic as I know any it crosses so many different areas of focus for people, right? I mean it's the CTOs, the CIOs, it's also the entire C suite, but it's also Judy in accounting and I think that's a big deal that everybody can get it right whenever they start picking software and really just being in charge of that overall selection process.
- [01:46]
B
Now Dustin, you have a best selling book. Let's take a look at it. It's a little bit out of frame so let's go ahead and show it. Say it loud and proud. There it is. Last Chance to Launch. And what's the subtitle?
- [01:59]
C
Last Chance to Launch and it's how leaders can rescue ERP and CRM projects from failure. It's just something we've seen so much of. I mean thinking about almost two decades now I guess and man, I feel old when I say that. Almost two decades of consulting experience for SAP, Microsoft and a lot of other software stacks. A lot of time camping out in conference rooms because that's the way we used to do it whenever we were implementing software for companies especially like erp, Enterprise Resource Planning software for companies camping out in conference rooms. Got a chance to really see what worked and what didn't. And the book is really just a way for me to tell the stories of some of those implementations that have gone right and some of the ones that have gone wrong and really excited about getting a chance to share that with everyone.
- [02:55]
B
Well, let's break down some of those acronyms because people in your field get the acronyms. I understand it because I've had to make some of these choices myself. But let's break it down. So what is an enterprise erp at
- [03:10]
C
its basic level, it's an accounting system. So think QuickBooks or something like that. Where most organizations start getting it wrong is actually whenever they think of it as only an accounting system. It's also supply chain, it's shipping, it's receiving, it's inventory management, it's warehouse management. Being able to do all of the things that an organization needs to do from a back office standpoint. And so a lot of organizations, they go into, okay, I'm ready to move away from QuickBooks because I'm going to that next level in my business. Maybe we've expanded to multiple locations, multiple countries, multiple product lines, and I'm outgrowing QuickBooks. What should I do next? And they go out and they look for enterprise resource management software. So Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP is common acronym that's out there. But unfortunately, I think a lot of people get it wrong. What it actually means and what it actually is for organizations, because you can make that jump you into that kind of software so early that you end up crippling your organization because it requires a level of sophistication that many SMB small, medium businesses just don't have today. The other one was CRM, Customer relationship management. That one's probably more common for a lot of organizations because they start looking at, okay, I need a place to track my customers and my contacts and I need to know what, what I'm selling people and be able to market to them and send emails and manage customer service cases and track customer complaints or replacement orders. Things like that are typically managed in a customer relationship management system.
- [04:56]
B
Yeah. And are they also two separate systems or can they be integrated into one?
- [05:04]
C
You know, a lot of organizations see them as separate systems as a strategy. There are certainly some companies out there that have a combined, a combined product suite. I mean, if we take a look at tools like Microsoft, SAP, I mean, they are probably the two biggest ones that kind of combine both ERP and CRM into a single product suite. I think the challenge with that that most organizations find though is it ends up always being a strength on one and weakness on another. And so having kind of distinct. We need to select CRM software. So let's go through a real evaluation process and determine what we need. And then we also need erp. Let's go through a real evaluation process to determine what we need is the best approach rather than just saying, well we're going to use Microsoft CRM because we're using Microsoft erp. That's not always the best fit for organizations just because everyone's at a different stage from a business process and a maturity standpoint.
- [06:09]
B
Well, I would imagine that they're often the functionality might be an issue, they might be strong in the ERP portion. Yet the sales and marketing and tracking may not equate to what is handled by let's say a kajabi or some of the other. I don't know what are some of the big well known CRMs that are current?
- [06:33]
C
Salesforce. Yeah, Salesforce is the biggest Salesforce right out there for sure. I mean they're the big elephant market leader. Yep, for sure. I mean, but if you think about it, I mean you get the Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce SAP. Those are by far kind of some of the big enterprise players in both ERP and CRM with Salesforce leading the pack on CRM for sure. But I mean you've seen their market cap, right? They are some massive companies. They're probably a lot better positioned to be in some of our investment portfolios than they are to be software inside of some of our organizations. But they just find a way to get a foothold into these organizations and start to become, you know, back office champions to be able to get in and sell across the, across the C suite. And so a lot of times you'll find a C level executive saying we're going Salesforce, we're going Microsoft because we are already using Salesforce or Microsoft in other parts of our organization. And that becomes a mistake so many times. I mean listen at this statistic. So standish group says 66% of these kind of projects fail. McKinsey says 17% of those threaten the survival of an organization when they're implemented. And BCG says 70% that do launch fail to actually deliver the expected outcome to the company. I mean that is just wild statistics for people that are trying to change their business on a positive way to grow. They're embarking on what could be a very risky journey to try to switch software in the middle of a business cycle. And that becomes dangerous for a lot of organizations.
- [08:18]
B
Why do they fail?
- [08:21]
C
Well, I think it's two things. One, I think it's a decision making issue. We see this a lot that number one, either projects start being run by IT departments, these IT departments get in and they're the ones who are responsible for selecting the software. They're responsible for requirements Gathering and making sure that it's going to handle all the workflows that a business may have. But many of those users will never log in to actually use the system. They're making these decisions based on purely IT decision rather than a business process decision. So letting it run the implementation or even the selection process in my opinion is a mistake. It's got to be run by the executives and by the frontline workers who are going to be using this technology every single day because they're the ones who actually know what's going on in the business. The second thing we see a lot of is if it's not it, it's probably procurement that's making a decision. So they've gone somewhere, they found a template of requirements of, you know, we need the system to do all of these things and they've sent it out as an RFP and vendors have responded to it. But that template doesn't tell the story of what a business's uniqueness is. And so if you lose that uniqueness in the business because you're now trying to adopt some off the shelf technology solution, that's what leads to that danger with organizations implementing some out of the box system that may handle 75% of the requirements, but may be missing 25% of their secret sauce.
- [09:59]
B
Well, you also mentioned the frontline people. So we just, we jokingly created an avatar called Judy in accounting. Where does she or Bill in accounting, you know, so I don't get in trouble with the woke. Are they integral or should they be integral in the decision making because they're utilizing the system every day.
- [10:24]
C
I'll give you a real world example so that way we don't get in trouble by Judy. But we implemented a warehouse management system for an organization and the day it's ready to launch, man, we went through testing, we allowed organization, the different frontline workers to use the technology. Everybody gave us a thumbs up. We're ready to go with this well go live day. Everyone got their hand scanners across the warehouse and they're starting to go out there and they're starting to pick inventory off the shelves using their hand scanners. Before it was a clipboard and a piece of paper that they were riding on on their forklift or anytime they were picking inventory. Well now they're moving to this digital hand scanner based technology. Day of go live, nothing's working right. We start getting reports like we're down, we can't issue shipments like this is costing us money. And it's the technology's fault. Nothing is working that we thought was supposed to be working. Well, come to find out like the barcodes that were put on the shelves, you know, sticky barcodes that were put on the shelves, they were put on the wrong shelving. Oh, you've got, you're trying to pick different inventory than what actually belongs in that location.
- [11:39]
B
Mislabeled.
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C
Mislabeled. And so that is a perfect example of sometimes if you're not down in the weeds testing this in real world scenarios with real users who are using this every day. And by the way, they were the ones responsible for putting the labels on the shelves. So you know, it lay fault wherever but the fault lies with not testing at the level at which the users who are actually going to be using the system would have needed to be testing. So I mean that kind of an issue, it's hard to catch if you're not involving those frontline workers. And what you typically find is you find, we call them, you know, creative problem solvers or troublemakers inside of an organization they operate as like this shadow it where they may have their own way of doing things. You know, they've got their own printer in their office where they're printing labels for packing shipments that are, you know, the system is failing at for some reason or they've got a computer. We actually had someone who had a computer literally like a tower desktop sitting under their desk where they had an access database where they were doing all kinds of their own logic and custom things to make the organization run. And it didn't know anything about it, the organization didn't know anything about it. And it starts to come out whenever you begin to try to implement these new tools. So unless you're involving those frontline workers and pulling them in to the decision early, it's just going to be a complete failure because the C suite does not always understand what's going on in
- [13:20]
B
the frontline workers even on a manual basis. I own an ad agency for years, Dustin, case in point. I still think about this and it pains me in my stomach when I think about it. I ran a, we had a warehouse and where we would do fulfillment on direct mail. We're going back quite a few years direct mail. But we had a letter that matched an envelope with a label on the outside. I had a worker who wanted to sabotage me because angry about something because I wrote her up because she was continually late. She put the wrong label to match the letter inside. And we had to re. And I had to make it up to the client and it cost me $7,000 because they were upset that we sent the wrong letter to the wrong person. So it says dear Dustin. And it was actually, you know, it was supposed, it was intended for Judy and it was sabotage. I mean, it's, you just don't know what they're. You got to check. And I guess they didn't do a check with these QR codes or barcodes matching. That's really what it is. Because you're, you're, let's say floor level employees can either help you or they can destroy you.
- [14:38]
C
It's true. I mean, there is no technology in the world, I mean, other than maybe, you know, sorting, sorting and putting all the labels on with robotics and things that are out there. But, you know, your basic ERP systems would have never found that problem. So whenever we walk into an organization, we fundamentally believe that the first thing you should do is what's called an as is. We literally want Word documents. I know this sounds old school in the day of AI, like this feels old school, but literally we want Word documents that, that call out click by click, task by task, everything that an organization is doing. And the way we get that is by actually talking to the people that are doing it. It's shocking sometimes for us to bring that document out to a CFO or CEO and say, here's what your process actually is that people are doing every day. And it's eye opening to them to say, I had no idea that they were doing things that manually, that the systems that we put in place five years ago actually aren't working, or in some cases are never even being used. All of those things are just, it's an eye opening exercise. And that's important for us before we ever go into, okay, now what do you want your technology to do so that we can select the right tool for the job. Knowing what you're doing today and what the actual frontline workers are doing, it's critical. But you touched on something else I wanted to mention and that is not only do you have to involve them, but they have got to have like the psychological safety to be able to raise their hand and say, actually that's not the way we're doing it at all. We had a marketing leader who we had worked with not too long ago who literally refused to let anybody in her organization have an opinion on anything. I mean, it was amazing. The team was collaborating, we were talking about all the things that the software needed to do and where there were gaps in processes where things were or were not working. And then Immediately the marketing director would join the call and it's like it would be complete silence from her team. Like everyone would say yes no matter what came out of her mouth. And that kind of environment, there's no question that whenever those systems launch, eventually it's not actually going to solve the problems that the frontline worker have because they don't have the freedom and to speak up and say, actually that's not how we're doing it. And actually we put this workaround in place and Bob is filling out a piece of paper and hanging it on a board somewhere. We've got sticky notes that are actually on the back wall of the warehouse that we're moving inventory around because the system we implemented doesn't work. If they don't have the freedom to say those kinds of things and challenge some of the decisions that are being made, they don't have that psychological safety to be able to do it, then there's no way that the system is going to be able to fulfill the real business requirements.
- [17:34]
B
So true. Yeah. And I, I think it does take, you know, you don't know what's going on at the base level unless you're working in it. Unless you're working in it. And you know, that particular situation. I, I remember, oh my gosh. You learn through experience and I guess popping your nose and realizing everybody matters in the decision making. Now where does, where does Dustin come into play here? What do you do for an organization?
- [18:03]
C
So I run our engagement department that does ERP and CRM specifically, so we call it Business Applications. I work for a company called Dynamic Consultants Group I founded about 12 years ago. And we have a proprietary methodology that we call spear. It stands for Surveillance, Performance Excellence, Automation and a roadmap. Essentially what my job is is to help organizations develop that roadmap for where they're going to go with technology using SPEAR as the way forward. So surveillance, meaning we have all of the data we need, it's in the right place, it's in the same place every time. Performance, meaning, okay, we've got our data, but how are we actually doing according to our metrics? Are we meeting or exceeding or underperforming against our KPIs or our metrics? And then excellence, meaning everybody in the company is doing the exact same process the same way every time. And then automation, and then, and only then automation. We've seen so many organizations that are trying to get to automation, especially in the day of AI. Everybody wants to move to automation, but yet they don't have surveillance. They don't have performance and they don't yet have organizational excellence. And it becomes a worse situation than it was before because they try to implement poor processes or automate dysfunction. And that can be a really big problem for companies. So assessing that SPEAR is really what my job is day to day and making sure we've got the right smart people in the room that understand industries and really help guide organizations through that kind of a complex process.
- [19:43]
B
And so who's your target market? I mean, typically, I don't think you would help the solopreneur necessarily. It's got to be a certain threshold, I would imagine
- [19:54]
C
we call it mid market enterprise. I think there's a little bit of ambiguity there because it's all about organizations that are ready for technology disruption. They're ready to move past QuickBooks, they're ready to move past their Excel spreadsheets. And to be honest, there's plenty of organizations that can get to 10, 20, $30 million in revenue. And operating in QuickBooks and in Excel spreadsheets is exactly where they need to be. But there are so many organizations that start to hit that ceiling where they just can't scale fast enough because they're wanting to open offices internationally, they're wanting to do offshore processes, they're wanting to have multiple legal entities, especially in manufacturing environments. We see that a lot. And so organizations that are trying to get past that ceiling is really where they become ready for technology disruption. And that's where doing something like SPEAR is so vital to make sure that they're picking the right software and the right processes to take them to the next level.
- [20:59]
B
So 30 million plus typically is your, would that be your sweet spot? 30 to 100, 250 million.
- [21:07]
C
Yeah. And even above. And we've got some enterprise clients out there. Just depending on a lot of those, large organizations may run even in smaller divisions or smaller groups. So it could be a part of a large organization, but maybe they've got a certain business unit that's primed for that digital transformation. That's our core sweet spot.
- [21:27]
B
Wow. Well, that makes a lot of sense. It's like you, you're. You put all. I'm sure you loved puzzles as a kid because then you're putting all the pieces together. Is that a fair, Fair evaluation?
- [21:40]
C
Absolutely. And there's nobody better at giving us puzzle pieces to put together than the tech companies. Right? I mean, they, they know how to create the pieces. They don't always know how to put them together.
- [21:53]
B
Well, that's, that's great. And Dustin where do people get in touch with you?
- [21:58]
C
Would love the opportunity to connect. If you go to dynamicconsultantsgroup.com you can actually do an online assessment there of your digital transformation. It's called our ERP or CRM assessment.
- [22:10]
B
Okay.
- [22:11]
C
That it's a great tool for organizations to try to assess if they feel like that they are in a ready position to do something like that. You can also just get in contact with us on that site. Would love to engage. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. Dustin Damaris. Feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. You can get the book on Amazon. It's available now and excited to see what.
- [22:33]
B
Show us that one more time.
- [22:36]
C
Let me know if you can see it. Okay.
- [22:38]
B
Yeah. Last chance. I see Last chance and then your name but at the top. I cannot read that text. Why don't you. Yeah, it says. Okay there.
- [22:45]
C
Stop.
- [22:46]
B
Back a little bit. Back a little bit. Yeah, the camera is a little out of focus. Why don't you read us to us with the sub. Yeah. Subtitle is at the top.
- [22:55]
C
Last chance to launch how leaders rescue erp, CRM and Digital Transformation projects from the edge of failure.
- [23:03]
B
Well, there you go. That sums it up right there. Congratulations on your best selling book and I really hope this you're able to rescue more people because I know from experience different organizations that I started and we made that digital transformation nightmare and if I had somebody like you, I think it would have made it. We didn't involve some of the ground level people and it was problematic. We had a custom software made and oh my did it. It was just fees after fees after fees and glitch after glitch to to solve it. This is some years ago but all part of the journey of being an entrepreneur. So thank you. Thank you so much for your time today. You were a great guest, very informative and people can go to dynamic dynamic consultants group.com Great. Thank you so much for your time today.
- [24:03]
C
Thank you.
- [24:04]
A
Thanks for tuning in to the Amazing Authorities podcast. If today's episode inspired you, take a moment to subscribe, rate and leave a review. It helps more experts like you rise to the top for behind the scenes access and free resources to boost your authority. Head to mitchcarson. Com until next time, stay amazing.